Saturday, April 30, 2011

Along with a bunch of other weary travelers, I trudged up the metal stairs of a charter bus parked on the pier alongside the cruise ship at 7:16 a.m. After we checked that our suitcases were lumped in with all the neatly stacked rows of luggage inside the terminal, we were driven uneventfully to the airport. It was mostly sunny with just a few high thin clouds, unlike the tropical rain storm that flooded the streets of Oistins the week before, when Andrew the taxi driver drove us in his Toyota Landcruiser through ankle deep water. My sinuses hurt, dripped here and there. Kim had been generous with her cold. My throat tickled off and on. I tried not to cough or hack. Kept a Kleenex handy.

Arriving at the airport, we off loaded and Kim rushed to the check in area while I gathered up our luggage from the bus. The check in and baggage check took over 30 minutes; none of the airline employees was in a hurry. The same at the "most annoying crepe shop ever" inside the terminal where many locals stood assembled by the counter in their airport uniforms (pilots, maintenance workers, one well-dressed lady who probably worked in one of the duty free shops) patiently waiting for coffee and maybe a savory crepe, but the lady behind the counter could only do one thing at a time. Ease a plastic glove from a bag. Slip it over one hand. Then the other hand. Then unwrap another plastic baggy. Pull out a crepe. Slowly lift a lid for a container of chicken or cheese. Because she had no bacon. No egg. No ham as indicated on the menu board. I had skipped the breakfast served on the ship because it was served at 6:30 a.m., much too early. After a customer carefully sorted some dozen coins onto the counter to pay for her order, the crepe lady fingered them one at a time, the dollar coins, the 50 cent coins, the 25 cent coins, and then the 10 cent coins, and deposited them with the pace and grace of an alligator inching down a river bank in the jungle.

I wondered if I would a) get a breakfast and if so b) would I then have time to buy some local rum from one of the many duty free shops in the terminal. I had this hankering to purchase a bottle of El Dorado rum I had sipped from a brandy glass at the Cafe Luna in Oistins, a rum made in Guyana and aged for 15 years. While I stood watching the frustratingly slow process unfold behind the counter, the concrete floor in the terminal felt like it was mildly rolling, pulsing, floating, as my sea legs unconsciously swayed my body slowly left and slowly right - part of my brain was still on that ship.

Finally I abandoned the crepe idea and walked to the nearby cafe where I had a ham and cheese croissant warmed in a microwave, a french yogurt, and a bottle of locally made citrus punch. Two ladies behind the counter, who nearly kept pace with hummingbirds, at least in comparison to the crepe lady, popped the goods into white paper bags, and rang up the purchase on a modern touchscreen, and Kim paid with a brightly colored $50 Barbados bill ($25 US). And I bought my Guyanian rum, which the man behind the counter was kind enough to squeeze into a protective cardboard container with a grip, and he taped it shut with strand after strand of strapping tape so that I could easily carry it on board for the American Airlines Flight 615 to Dallas - Fort Worth. The plane taxied down the runway at 10:16 a.m. and we were away.

Saturday, April 23, 2011

The young driver’s name was Jerry. I would guess he was in his mid 20’s. Tall, trim, and handsome. He sort of groused at the older man (who flashed this laminated sheet pasted with various pictures of island tours and had called Jerry over to drive us in his taxi for a late afternoon trip over to Champagne Beach for a bit of snorkeling). Down at the end of the cruise boat pier in Roseau Dominica, Kim and I joined Pam and her Greek boyfriend Stathi for this impulsive jaunt. Just two days ago Pam and her man were on the catamaran to Tobago Cay, where she bent my ear for half an hour after she drank who knows how many rum punches, lauding me for my boyish looks at my age and complaining about the darned size of this cruise all the while sipping on a plastic cup full of grapefruit colored rum punch in one hand and holding down her sun hat with the other. To add insult to injury she was from Dallas (just kidding Pam!)!

Well we marched behind the grouchy driver Jerry to his taxi just a block away and he loaded us up into a boxy Nissan van. Even though we all wondered why he was so irritated, we still went. Although, thinking back now, one of us did ask him if he really wanted to take us. “Sure, no problem.” He drove along the southeast coast of Dominica on Loubiere Road, with the sun making its slow descent towards the ocean for the evening. The coastal road was rutted in some spots, speed bumped in others. Along the way, he navigated through small villages – first Wall House and then Pointe Michel and finally to Champagne Beach. Stathi informed us that Jerry must have earned his PhD (pot hole driver) because he had dodged the biggest clunkers in the road.

With the taxi parked, we hustled down to beach to beat the sunset. Champagne Beach was rocky with stones piled atop black sand. Along the sandy trail, a few bright green iguanas skedaddled up the crackling dry hillside, and Stathi stopped for a few photos.

Flailing backwards into the water with fins and a snorkel mask was no picnic, what with the boulders and rocks and the surf rolling in. Although Kim beat us all into the sea, she beat us back out of the water too. As soon as I flopped into the sea with the grace of a drunken sailor, she came swimming back to the beach, blurting out curses – jelly fish this and jelly fish that.

But I persisted, and even Kim relented, wading back into the water, and then I saw how Champagne Beach had earned it's name - hot volcanic bubbles burbled from the sea floor, between schools of bright tropical fish, bubbling up from bright blue and pink patches of coral, between tall stalks of orange tube coral. Kim and I floated in bliss, grinning, thumbs up through this alley of bubbles. They made bubbling sounds too, like a toddler making popping sounds with his mouth, and that was surprising.

Finally we wandered back to the taxi, taking more pictures of the green iguanas. I was happy we had risked the impromptu adventure. But we were not yet done. Jerry drove his taxi up to a point overlooking Roseau, up hilly and winding roads, like weaving one’s way up Mulholland Drive above LA. There perched above Roseau, we looked west towards the sun touching the horizon, and below us we saw a cricket stadium and botanical gardens and two types of hummingbirds drinking nectar, and heard a marching band tuning up at a local school.

Jerry happily snapped a photo of each couple kissing with the sunset in the background, and then he drove us down to the town, through the Botanical Gardens, pointing out the caca de devil plant, a sausage tree, two caged parrots, and a crushed yellow school bus that was brought to rest by a tree downed in a hurricane; the bus, rusted and diminutive, remains to this day in its last resting place.

Sated with the afternoon’s adventures, we began our final trek back to the pier. Stathi and Pam somehow learned from Jerry that the man on the pier who had annoyed him was his father. And Jerry softened a bit at this, saying that there was indeed friction sometimes between the two (and we all nodded our heads knowingly, parents of adult children). But Jerry said that all it needs at times is a little oil and that love provides that oil, smoothing out the friction. His early grumpiness now made sense. So we boarded the cruise ship reminded of the universality of conflict and love between parents and children, and made it just in time for a quick series of snapshots of the setting sun off the starboard side, an orange ball drowning itself in the sea and flinging up sheets of pink into the sky. I hoped that our young Jerry, PhD, would now be out on the town with his taxi tips partying with his young friends for the evening.

Saturday, April 16, 2011

Today at sea. Passing St Lucia on the starboard side. I'm sleepy. Drowsy. On that Kroger brand of Dramamine. Taken this morning around dawn. The ship groaned and creaked, starboard to port and back. Sunrise may have draped the morning sky with a coating of yellow stringent, but I could not tell, our two portholes hidden behind a heavy drape. So dark. A sleeping in kind of day. No ports of call. No excursions. Just cruising the sea. Sails full. Sea smudged with small white caps. I had a massage, Swedish style. My masseuse was a young, short, athletic looking South African woman with rough scratchy hands and her hair pulled back in a ponytail. At lunch, I overhear two couples at the next table talking about the other Windstar cruises. Wind Spirit. Wind Star. Smaller 100 person cruise ships. In the Mediterranean. And this ship, the Wind Surf, carrying 300 passengers, cruises there in two weeks, done with the Caribbean.

A realtor from Dallas yesterday complained to me about how this cruise was too big compared to the other Windstar cruises. I’m thinking to myself – any cruise is too big for me. I hear from the Pittsburgh couple, Don and Becky, about the 5,000 person cruises on Carnival or Royal Caribbean. Ships eight, nine, ten stories tall. Small cities afloat with tiered auditoriums, multiple casinos, people in lines at buffets, comedy clubs - I cannot imagine a much less desirable thing.

The El Paso couple Roger and Carol, don't much like this cruise. He is an employment attorney in his late 40’s, thinning hair, Texas twang, and Carol is his trophy wife, a Mexico native, very pretty, who wears black bikinis and large stylish sunglasses. Roger complains about there being too little to do on this cruise compared to the big cruises. He didn't like Tunisia or Morocco either. All men there, very few children or women visible in the streets. Kind of scary. He thought Mayreau looked sketchy yesterday, where litter scattered dry hillsides and dark skinned men stood in the shades of doorways. When Kim and I walked there, we watched two puppies clamber over each other in the crackling grass, tumbling and playing, while momma dog strolled here and there with her teats hanging low with milk.

Don (our resident smoker, non-drinker, concrete contractor and schmooze master) and his wife Carol, newly annointed empty nesters from Pittsburgh, ate lunch with another couple in this "sketchy" open air restaurant on Mayreau, saying they ate delicious fresh grilled lobster probably caught that morning. That sounded great but I hoped they wouldn’t come down with food poisoning. Kim and I strolled up and down the single concrete lane in Old Wall village on Mayreau, and at the mountain peak, not far from a fairly new and beautiful Catholic church facing west and above the sea, a tall lanky woman, her girls playing behind her in their school uniforms, asked if Kim and I could donate to a local fundraiser for the church, showing us a sign up sheet just like fundraising sheets back home for community causes. We had not brought any dough with us. Which made it possible to decline gracefully, for better or for worse.

It is strange to travel so far away from home because history comes rushing back. I took a Royal Caribbean cruise twenty years ago with my first wife Debbie when she was pregnant with Riley (now 19 and a freshman in college!), but I don't remember much more than a smoky casino in San Juan, Puerto Rico, a private beach in Haiti, bingo games, and the long forgotten faces of friends made and Christmas cards no longer sent. So I really have no claims to make on taking other cruises like the rest of the 300 people aboard. Some grandiose part of me thinks that my nearly cruise free past somehow makes me better than them.

I am curious about a talent/skill/habit of mine - ask probing questions and drop comments to pinpoint shared experiences and common topics of conversation (usually travel related) amidst a field of possibilities – other cruises, Disney resorts, adventure travel, Hawaii, rainforests, zip line tours, river rafting, Costa Rica. And those become the topics of conversation. Small talk to wile away the daze. I find too many interactions painfully awkward (ugh small talk) and classify those other folks as shallow, fearful, un-adventurous, bored with too much money to spend and not enough sense. I suppose the reality is that there are so many different people in the world and I am often surprised that there are so many people different from myself. And all those judgments (projections) come from inside myself – my own shallowness, my own fears, my own boredom.

So El Paso won’t go back to Africa but he will sign up for another one of the bigger cruises. I think Don and Becky will return to the bigger cruises too. They are social butterflies. And I hope to return to independent travel, and am even now thinking of more U.S. travel. Zion and Grand Canyon were incredible sights. Why not see more of my own country? Many beautiful and interesting places. Yosemite. Moab. Niagara Falls. New Orleans.

Monday, April 11, 2011

Today came the catamaran and snorkel excursion to Tobago Cays, famous for beach scenes from Pirates of the Caribbean. The sun sent forth a froth of filtered sunshine through layers of silky clouds. Forty of us loaded from a dock onto a bobbing catamaran after gurgling to shore in a tender – one of the motorized lifeboats put into service. For some reason, standing on the dock reminded me of a trip that Kim and I took last year to northern Idaho to go fishing with her two younger brothers, Mike and Chris. When we arrived in Idaho, it was nearing twilight, but we stopped at a sporting goods store anyway and picked up bait, fishing licenses, and a new rod and reel for me, and then we met her brother Mike at a small lake ringed with pine trees. Our dog Kelty, when walking out onto the dock, decided she was a water dog after all and plunged into the lake, splashing and spluttering, leash and all, and our yellow lab dog-paddled back to shore while I walked alongside her on the dock. But no dogs here in the Grenadines. The crew from the catamaran gathered our paper tickets and gave the ladies a hand getting on board, supporting their elbows as they hopped aboard. The engines growled as we pulled away from the dock but they soon raised the sails and sailed we did, plunging through the frothy seas.

We sailed past a spit of sand dotted with palms. Just a dinky stretch of beach. Sort of like Caye Caulker in Belize. On a trip some ten years ago, Kim and I took a snorkel tour from Ambergris Caye in Belize to Shark Ray Alley with a skipper by the name of Tar Baby (yes, his real nickname) and Suave (the handsome Gilligan). The pair nearly ran the boat out of fuel while returning from the excursion in a sudden rain squall, nearly got us all lost, perhaps as far north as Mexico, two Americans without a lick of identification. I had fronted Tar Baby some of his Belizean dollars for our snorkel tour in the Lazy Lizard Bar on Caye Caulker. He drank a beer or two, that I counted anyway. When we left the Caye, he ducked under a cover on the bow for a snooze while the clouds descended and rain eventually pelted us full in the face. We wore swimsuits and we wore tank tops and we wore flip flops. Not much else. We draped towels over our heads as if they wouldn’t become waterlogged in a matter of minutes. It was a tropical rain and it wasn’t altogether unpleasant. Like reheated leftovers. Suave drove the boat. He squinted at a fogged up compass mounted by the boat’s steering wheel and tried without success to clear the condensate with his thumb. Just trying to get his bearings. He bent his head into sheets of rain. Then the engine sputtered. Low on fuel. Finally Suave lifted the canvas cover and gave his captain a gentle but firm kick in the rear end. Land was eventually found and gas was replenished.

But back in the Grenadines, the weather was golden today, pristine. Perfect amount of cloud cover – not too much or too little. Once we reached Tobago Cays we snorkeled. Dozens of colorful fish swam past in orderly pools. Several boxy shaped puffer fish darted about. I saw one eel but no Nemo. Even a pencil fish or two skimmed just below the surface. These fish of course need warm sea water to survive, and back in the day, when I was a kid, my Dad kept an aquarium of tropical fish. I mostly remember the guppies and catfish, but we had an Angelfish or two, and with their triangular shapes and long flowing fins, they were especially graceful. Once Dad transferred the Angelfish into a goldfish bowl because he somehow knew she was about to lay its eggs, and sure enough, the water turned to milky tapioca with the hundreds of eggs released by the female. Too bad not one grew to adulthood.

Well, once we finished with our snorkeling, we meandered over the sandy beach, flirted with sand crabs and watched the pursuit of colorful iguanas by camera toting tourists. Then we loaded onto the catamaran for rum punch. Aw Caribbean rum! You’ve got to love it! Once I bought some on a business trip to St. Croix when I was in the Army in the late 1980’s. It was dark rum with a caramel taste. It was yummy mixed with Coca-Cola (or as the people of Atlanta call it: co-cola). Our spirits now lightened with rum punch, the catamaran sailed some more, wind gusting into our faces and carelessly whipping our hair about in dozens of different directions. Rum rum rum in our tummies.

We cruised past Palm Island Resort, a ritzy island dotted with palm trees and palapas, with only 43 available guest rooms, the very least expensive going for only $625 a night! It reminded me of the secluded Heron Island perched on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia where we traveled to in 2001 and from where Kim and I booked a day trip to the deserted Wilson Island, an even smaller island chock full of coral beaches, an island so teeny tiny that one could walk around it in ten minutes. And we were the only ones there! Aw the glory of that day! And this day too, when we finally returned on the catamaran to Mayreaux, hungry, thirsty, sunburned, glad, and still a bit rum tipsy.